In plain words: People labeled mistakes in captions from chart-describing AI systems; a checker compares each claim to the chart, and a two-step fixer rewrites the wrong ones. Even the best systems often state wrong numbers or trends; this checker and fixer beat others at spotting errors.
Abstract · Do LVLMs Understand Charts? Analyzing and Correcting Factual Errors in Chart Captioning
Recent advancements in large vision-language models (LVLMs) have led to significant progress in generating natural language descriptions for visual content and thus enhancing various applications. One issue with these powerful models is that they sometimes produce texts that are factually inconsistent with the visual input. While there has been some effort to mitigate such inconsistencies in natural image captioning, the factuality of generated captions for structured document images, such as charts, has not received as much scrutiny, posing a potential threat to information reliability in critical applications. This work delves into the factuality aspect by introducing a comprehensive typology of factual errors in generated chart captions. A large-scale human annotation effort provides insight into the error patterns and frequencies in captions crafted by various chart captioning models, ultimately forming the foundation of a novel dataset, CHOCOLATE. Our analysis reveals that even state-of-the-art models, including GPT-4V, frequently produce captions laced with factual inaccuracies. In response to this challenge, we establish the new task of Chart Caption Factual Error Correction and introduce CHARTVE, a model for visual entailment that outperforms proprietary and open-source LVLMs in evaluating factual consistency. Furthermore, we propose C2TFEC, an interpretable two-stage framework that excels at correcting factual errors. This work inaugurates a new domain in factual error correction for chart captions, presenting a novel evaluation mechanism, and demonstrating an effective approach to ensuring the factuality of generated chart captions. The code and data as well as the continuously updated benchmark can be found at: https://khuangaf.github.io/CHOCOLATE/.
Kung-Hsiang Huang, Mingyang Zhou, Hou Pong Chan, Yi R. Fung, Zhenhailong Wang, Lingyu Zhang, Shih-Fu Chang, Heng Ji
arXiv:2312.10160 · cs.CL · submitted Dec 15, 2023 · updated May 30, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · ACL 2024 Findings